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Published: December 2nd 2007
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New York, New York - this place is INSANE!! (In a good way of course....!) We love it here 😊
We arrived here Wednesday night, flying into La Guardia and the public transport is easy and cheap! We stayed in the Upper west side and it's a pretty good location for the sights without costing bucket loads as NY usually does! We quickly found the subways are cheap and easy to use, and used them for the majority of our transport while here. Some of the stations are pretty scummy, but otherwise they're fine!
Our first full day here we went into town and wandered around the amazing Times Square, the lights and billboards are insane even during the day. Never seen anything like it! From there we went around a whole lot of the main sights in Downtown NY, spent time browsing the stalls in China Town, had a fantastic pasta lunch in Little Italy and then booked tickets for 'Avenue Q' on Broadway. (Couldn't possibly come to NY without seeing a Broadway show!!) We went to the 8pm session of Avenue Q at the Golden theatre, and it was absolutely brilliant! We were in the second row
of the Orchestra, so RIGHT up front! The actors, music and puppets were absolutely fantastic, it had lots of those oh-so-shocking-shouldn't-be-laughing-but-this-is-damn-hilarious moments!! ;-) It was sooooooooo funny!
The next day we made sure we started the day with New York bagels (yum!) then wandered through Central Park, from 95th street where we were staying right down to the South end at 59th Street, stopping along the way to take photos, check out Trump's ice skating rink and watch the horse carriages go by. Then of course we had to stop for an American hot dog at a hotdog vendor! They even had beef ones for Kristi ;-) After that we headed uptown to check out Harlem which is no way like the slums you see in the movies these days!! The area is pretty nice (real estate's getting pretty pricey!) and there's always loads going on! Cool to check out the bargain shopping and "soul food" restaurants! That night we went on a 2 hour "Night tour" of NYC which was really cool - the city is amazing at night! We started the tour in Times Square, which is even more surreal at night! There are so many billboards
Busy boys...
We watched these guys painting the building for a while - so cool! and lights that it might as well be daytime, the area is soooo light. The night tour took us through all the major downtown sights, across the Brooklyn Bridge (omigod THAT was FReeeeeeeeeeeeezing!!! We were upstairs on a double decker bus and we thought our limbs may actually have frozen off!! Its amazing, its warmer here than the -5 to -18 degrees we had in Canada but at times feels heaps cooler.) ANYWAY, it was cool going across the bridge on the top deck of the bus, it was incredibly high up! The tower height of the bridge is 276 feet and back in the 1800s some crazy stuntman jumped off it for a princely sum of $200. Crossing the bridge at night was really awesome. Then we went through Brooklyn as well to check out some sights there. It was a great tour, highly recommended!
The third full day we had here we slept in for ages (purely by accident ;-) ) then went down to Battery Park where we took compulsary photos of the Statue of Liberty across the harbour. We then went to the Staten Island ferry terminal (they run a free ferry to and from)
and were going to go back and forth across the harbour but decided against it and went on a trip over to Brooklyn instead to check out that borough which was again very different from other places we had been. After that we went to see the huge Christmas Tree all lit up at the Rockefeller Centre and walked down Madison Avenue then again we wandered around Times Square - which is is an incredible place to people watch! We attempted to go to the good ol' Hard Rock Cafe for dinner, but the wait for the restaurant was over 2 hours so decided against it!
Our time here in NY has absolutely flown by! I think you could stay here for weeks and still not see everything! We already talk about the next time we come back because there's so much more we already want to do and see (and of course, Kristi wants to go shopping.........which surprisingly is actually very cheap if you look around!) The weather has been pretty cold - the highs have been between 1 and 5 degrees but it's really felt much colder! They think it might even snow tomorrow, the day we
fly out - maybe we'll get some in the morning!
There are so many interesting facts and figures we could mention about NY - many strangely have to do with $$ or "the biggest this or that in the world" - but we will resist sounding like a brochure, to experience the organized mayhem that is New York you really need to come here. TV and movies just don't do it justice - although on the flipside, so much of the city is straight out of the movies :-) One of the most interesting things here is how safe it feels - police everywhere and the people are generally quite friendly too - none of the dark menace that is often associated with NYC - even at night :-) It is also quite funny how they ALL wear black here!! (feels like an All Blacks game! heehee don't tell the New Yorkers!)
It's just been so easy to just WANDER around here - every street has something interesting whether it be interesting buildings, people or culture. And of course, the numbered streets make it so easy to always know where you are!
Update: Just when we thought
our time here couldn't get any better, we woke on our final morning to find it was snowing 😊 The whole city was covered in about 3-4 cm of lovely white powdery snow - and as it was sunday morning, not much had been scraped away yet - it just looked magic! Pretty cool being here for the first snow of the year 😊
Till next time NYC! Now it's off to biggest Vegas!
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ghaz
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i always thought nyc was a massive city until i came to hong kong....it surpasses mental on the mental scale. I've never seen so many skyscrapers and condos in my life. So i'd like to take the 'city that never sleeps' title from nyc and give it to HK. :)